protected the rights of the Imperial Government. A weak Ministry
depending on Irish votes rules, or rather is ruled, at Downing Street.
Every one knows how, under the supposed conditions, the affair will
end. There will be a transaction of some sort, and we may be certain
that such a transaction will be to the advantage of the Irish
Government, and will weaken or discredit Imperial or English authority.
We come round here to the root of the whole matter. Were the
Restrictions on the power of the Irish Parliament real and easily
enforceable, were the obligations imposed upon or undertaken by the
Irish people obligations of which an English Ministry could at once
compel the fulfilment, Restrictions and obligations alike would be
rendered futile and unreal by the presence of the Irish members at
Westminster. Every Home Rule scheme which can be proposed is impolitic
and is as dangerous as Separation; but the most impolitic of all
possible forms of Home Rule is the scheme embodied in the Bill of 1893.
Its special and irremediable flaw is the retention of the Irish members
at Westminster. This governs and vitiates all the leading provisions of
the new constitution. Under its influence every conceivable safeguard,
the supreme authority of Parliament, the veto, the legal restrictions on
the competence of the Irish legislature melt away into nothing.

They are some of them capable of doing harm, they are none of them
capable of doing good.

Cast a glance back at the leading features of the new constitution.

The Imperial Parliament remains in form unchanged, and retains the
attribute of nominal sovereignty. But in Ireland the Imperial Parliament
surrenders all, or nearly all, the characteristics of true and effective
power; it retains in fact in Ireland nothing more than the right to
effect under the semblance of a legal proceeding a revolution which
after all must be carried out by force. For practical purposes it has no
more power at Dublin than it has at Melbourne, _i.e._ it retains at
Dublin scarcely any real power whatever.

For the sake of this nominal and shadowy authority the Imperial
Parliament is itself transformed into a strange cross between a British
Parliament and the Congress of an Anglo-Irish Federation.

The Irish Executive and the Irish Parliament become under the new
constitution the true and real Government of Ireland. But the Irish
Government and the Irish people are fettered by Restrictions which woul